


The Sculptor

by raininshadows



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raininshadows/pseuds/raininshadows
Summary: Lucy and Lockwood deal with the ghost of a sculptor who refuses to leave his work.





	The Sculptor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wolfraven80](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfraven80/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope you like the fic!

So there we were, me and Lockwood, at about nine at night, standing outside an ordinary-looking little house in a London suburb. Ms. Khan, the landlady, had handed us the keys when she hired us earlier that day. George had looked up enough to confirm her story - Matthew Griffith had been a sculptor of some note who'd died "suddenly" about a week ago, leaving behind a large body of unfinished work. His work was a bit too artistic for me, but apparently in certain circles he was considered brilliant. 

Lockwood unlocked the door; I dragged the duffel bag inside, then flipped on the lights to look around. 

The sculptor’s house was dark, cold, and quiet, like most of the houses we saw, barely lit by the streetlights outside. It was also empty, although you wouldn’t have known from a glance at any room in the building. The sculptures he’d worked on until his death - obsessively trying to make them perfect, we’d been told, until he’d dropped dead of a heart attack as he carved - took up every available inch of space except for narrow walkways between the rooms. They looked beautiful, but somehow spare, as if there had been important parts carved away. 

Lockwood and Co. had been called in because the sculptor’s ghost was still residing there. Fortunately, no one had re-rented the home yet. The landlady had come in to check the place out, then returned the next day and noticed that the sculptures looked different. The first agency she’d hired had bailed on the job after one of them got ghost-touched by the sculptor trying to take his face off with a chisel. (He’d mostly dodged, which had been good enough to save his life.) 

"So, guesses on the Source?" Lockwood asked, looking around us. We’d managed to get into the living room, where several of the narrow walkways met and made a clear patch wider than any other. The sculptures seemed to loom at us from every angle. Most of them seemed to be trying to depict humans or body parts - here a rib cage, there the muscles under a face, over in that corner a weirdly angled shape that somehow seemed to suggest a woman. It didn't look like we'd be able to find a better place to set up. 

"One of the sculptures," I said, pulling the chains out of the bag. Lockwood knelt to help me. "Either that or his tools, but I'd say probably a sculpture. The one he was working on when he died, whichever that one was." 

"Yeah, I'd say you're right," Lockwood said. "Probably he'll form near it." The circle finished, he stepped into the next room. "Which means we need to be wandering around. There's sculptures everywhere in here, and he could be attached to any of them — Ms. Khan said the sculptures seemed to be moving, too." 

"Powerful, then," I said, walking into what appeared to be the kitchen. It was decorated with many, many sculptures of eyes, all of which seemed to be staring at me. I sincerely hoped the Source wasn’t one of those. "Has to be, if it's actually moving stuff. It didn't sound like a Poltergeist, although I wouldn't really want to take a guess at that based on what she remembers being told by the first agency." 

The house was dismally bare of everything except statues. One side room hosted a bed wedged into the corner, and the trash can held the debris of takeout meals, but other than that, it almost looked more like a museum than someone’s house. It would be an hour or two yet before the ghost appeared, probably, so we were exploring the house and seeing what was there. Possibly he’d left his tools near the sculpture he’d been working on or something useful like that. 

We had no such luck. It looked like the place had been cleaned up after he died — Ms. Khan had said she’d been working on getting the place ready to re-rent, although she’d only had a day before she’d realized Matthew Griffith had stuck around. The tools had been relocated to a kitchen counter, although they didn’t seem to be moving around like the statues were. “Did Ms. Khan say how exactly the statues were moving?” I asked, poking my head out of the living room to see Lockwood kneeling to examine a statue that was only about a foot tall in the entryway. 

He looked up at me. “No. Just that they were moving. Why?”

I looked back at the statue that seemed to be trying to look like a woman. “I think he’s been working on them.”

Lockwood stood up and began moving towards me, careful of the scattered statues. “What do you mean?”

“We thought he’d stuck around so he could keep going on whatever sculpture he was working on when he died,” I said, pointing towards the woman statue that had caught my eye. “I think maybe that’s what Ms. Khan meant when she said the statues were moving.” I couldn’t say what exactly made me think that, or what made me think that this particular statue was the important one. The edges seemed rawer than the ones on the other sculptures somehow, as if they’d been recently hewn, but they looked the same. 

Lockwood gingerly stepped towards it. It was in the corner of the room, behind a defensive line of spiky statues that jutted out at odd angles and promised to trip the careless. “Pass me the thermometer,” he said, his brow furrowing, as he drew closer. I handed the thermometer over; it wasn’t showing anything particularly unusual where I was, but it was closing in on midnight, and the ghost could well be beginning to manifest. 

“Forty-seven,” he said softly, looking at it. “It’s around here.” 

Lockwood came back to the little walkway between the statues, and into the circle of the iron chains with me. “He’s probably attached to that statue, and going to manifest soon. He shouldn’t be that much of a threat, but after he nearly killed that kid from the other agency, we should still be careful.”

I nodded, keeping an eye on the woman statue. “He’s pretty strong.”

“He must have cared a lot about his art,” Lockwood said. 

The air temperature suddenly, precipitously dropped. We both turned to face the woman statue, drawing our rapiers. The ghost of Matthew Griffith shimmered slowly into view. 

He didn’t seem to notice us at first. That was pretty normal — it was a rare ghost that was able to recognize what was happening around it fully — but he could see the statue. He was holding what appeared to be ghostly tools, including the chisel he’d probably swung at the kid from the previous agency, and carefully poking at the statue with them. It didn’t seem to be doing much - his touch coated it with a thin layer of ice, but wasn’t actually scraping away stone. 

He glared at it, as if not understanding why it wasn’t working. Then he turned away and caught sight of us. He smiled, as if seeing a new project to work on. 

Lockwood’s rapier interrupted him, and I pulled out the silver net and made ready to try to dodge around him and throw it over the statue. It rippled like water in my hands, and the ghost of Matthew Griffith seemed to immediately recognize that it was a threat. He immediately broke off his attack on Lockwood and focused on me. With my hands full of silver net, I couldn’t use my rapier against him. Instead, Lockwood leaped to my defense. 

I ducked to the side, using the silver net as a shield. Lockwood stepped between us, holding off the ghost while I tried to slide around their fight. Unfortunately, Matthew Griffith was clearly aware that I was the larger threat, and kept trying to get to me. 

Finally, I broke away from the two of them and sprinted to the side. Lockwood, seeming to read my mind, managed to keep himself between the ghost and me. I didn’t have the time to pick my way through the statues, so I just kept running. I felt my foot land on one of them and twist under me with an explosion of pain, but it was only a few steps more to the woman statue. I tossed the net over it, and as the net settled with a dissonant grace over the woman statue, Matthew Griffith’s ghost vanished. 

I hit the ground hard as the bad ankle collapsed, my head struck yet another badly placed statue, and everything went kind of fuzzy. The next thing I knew, Lockwood was kneeling next to me, shaking me, and my head hurt a lot. 

“Oh, _good_ , you’re awake,” he said, relieved. 

“How long was I out?” I mumbled. Words seemed unusually hard at the moment. 

“Only a minute or so,” he said. “Don’t try to move. I’m going to call an ambulance.”

He did. They came and carted me off to the hospital. My ankle was broken and I had a concussion; they cast the ankle and decided to keep me for the day to make sure the concussion didn’t get worse. I woke up around noon to find Lockwood napping in a chair next to my bed. He’d come with us to the hospital, but then had to go back to the house to get the statue down to the furnaces. 

As I watched, his eyes opened and he smiled at me. His smile was as bright as ever. “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” I said, then added “The ankle hurts, but it’s not too bad.”

His hand found mine and squeezed. “Good,” he said softly, and just for that moment, it all seemed all right.


End file.
